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Topic: Populating Mating Nucs (Read 6168 times)

Next summer I want to raise 30 to 40 queens to allow me to requeen all of my colonies and have queens for fall splits.I was thinking that I could populate the mating nucs with queenless package bees. I didn't want to remove bees from my honey production colonies and it seems like a viable method.I was just wondering what methods others used.

The best is to use a mating nuc that takes two of your brood frames. (my brood frames are mediums). You give them a frame of brood and a frame of honey and you're done. Trying to use the mini mating nucs is, in my opinion, too much work and too prone to failure.

The best is to use a mating nuc that takes two of your brood frames. (my brood frames are mediums). You give them a frame of brood and a frame of honey and you're done. Trying to use the mini mating nucs is, in my opinion, too much work and too prone to failure.

Michael, I to use all medium frames and those are what I was going to use to fill the mating nucs. I just didn't want to strip population from my honey production colonies to populate them with bees. I felt that two frames as you stated and 1000 bees would suffice for enough population to keep the SHB under control and properly care for the virgin queen. I have your book and am using it to formulate my plans.

Certainly if you have the money to buy some packages, you could install them and then a few weeks later break them up for mating nucs. I've done this many times in the past to get more nucs earlier than I could otherwise. But as the quality of the packages keeps slipping and the price keeps going up, I probably won't anymore.

I used packages last year to populate my nucs. Here is the sordid story. I ordered 6, 2 queens were dead on arrival and one was a drone layer. Once the packages got it together, it was OK. It certainly was a pain to get them going.

There is a small price difference whether the package is queenless or not. I would suggest you get the package with a queen, so you get brood. If the packages are early enough (about a month before you are ready with your queens), the brood that they produce will allow you to reduce the numbers that you need to order. Obviously, you need to account for the packages dismal success rate. Then again, last year was a bad year for packages.

I plan to buy my packages from Wilbanks Apiary in GA. They come recommended form a trusted advisor. I purchased 3 queens from them last year and I was very pleased with their performance. Solid brood pattern, large population and gentilness.I plan to use 6-5lb packages and their genetics as my breeder stock. Wilbanks deals with mainly Italian stock. I'm not employed by them, just a satisfied customer.Added benefit is that I live close enough to pick up.

How many packages do you plan to order? Also, are you going to raise all the queens in one batch or do you plan to stagger the batches?

I'm buying 6-5lb packages. I plan to feed heavily to get comb drawn. Then pick the best performer as the mother of all.I have to build 40 mating nucs, I'm considering multi-level but I'm not sure. And, yes all at once.

can I assume you are talking about population 'baby nuc' mating boxes and not full size boxes here????

what you suggest is with some significant modification for scale pretty much how a lot of commercial folks populate baby nuc boxs (typically made up with a feeder and two baby nuc frames with foundation... that is there is no comb in the box). generally you stock and place in the first cells at the same time and leave these plugged up for at least one day and sometimes two < quite reasonable if you live somewhere with wide fluctuation in temperature then some ventilation need to be built into the boxes and almost by necessity the boxes should be bee tight.

I'm a little north of you. Here before mid april temp to cool and not enough drones. Usually after that time a couple frames of open and cap brood one honey and pollen. Don't believe it wiil hurt honey production, field bees will return home,and the brood will not be old enough to forage until right at the end of main flow around here, bout the end of May, first couple weeks of June. This arrangement worked for me this year. But last warm enough to raise queens in Feb, and plenty of drones. All depends on the weather.

If you are just wanting to raise queens to requeen your hives why not just use the queen cells to requeen the hives? You are going through an extra step by mating the queens just to move them again to requeen a hive. Keep the starter hive going and regraft about 1 1/2 weeks after you place the first round of cells. Then when you back through the hives you will have extra queen cells for the few hives that end up not making a mated queen. Then you have no need for a bunch of mating nucs. JMHO